*** 1998 ***
June 21-26 (Singapore) 5th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS-5)
Contact Brian Phillips, School of Mathematical Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, P O Box 218, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
email: bphillips@swin.edu.au
June 29-30 (Perth) Optimization Day V: 1998 Miniconference on Optimization
Contact X Q Yang, Department of Mathematics, University of Western Australia.
email: yangx@maths.uwa.edu.au
June 29 - July 10 (Auckland) Workshop on Numerical Ordinary Differential Equations in Theory and Practice
email: ANODE@math.auckland.ac.nz website: http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~anode/
July 2 - 4 (Toowoomba, Queensland) Bridging the Distance: Bridging Mathematics Network 8th Annual Conference
Contact Janet Taylor, University of Southern Queensland.
email: taylorja@usq.edu.au
July 6 - 9 (Wellington) 1998 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium
Contact Chris Atkin, School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington.
email: Chris.Atkin@vuw.ac.nz website http://cantor.maths.vuw.ac.nz:1998/
July 6-10 (Brisbane, Queensland) 23rd Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing
Contact Elizabeth Billington, Department of Mathematics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.
email: ejb@maths.uq.oz.au
July 9 - 10 (Hervey Bay, Queensland) Workshop on New Methods in Applied and Computational Mathematics (NEMACOM `98)
Contact NEMACOM `98, C/- Dr S Olliveira, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station , TX 77843-3112, USA,
email: nemacom98@cs.tamu.edu
website: http//www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/oliveira/nemacom98/
July 13 - 15 (Gold Coast) 4th Australian Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Sport
Contact Neville de Mestre, Bond University.
email: neville_de_mestre@bond.edu.au
July 13 - 16 (Adelaide) 3rd (Biennial International) Engineering Mathematics and Applications Conference (EMAC `98)
Contact Conference Chair EMAC 98, Associate Professor Jagannath Mazundor, Department of Applied Mathematics, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5051, Australia,
email: jmazunda@maths.adelaide.edu.au
website: http://www,maths.adelaide.edu.au/Applied EMAC98
September 7 - 12 (Mission Beach, Queensland) International Conference on Partial Differential Equations and Related Topics
email: pde98@maths.anu.edu.au
September 28 - October 1 (Sydney) 1998 Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society
Contact R Howlett, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney.
email: R.Howlett@maths.usyd.edu.au
Call for Papers
DMTCS'99,
Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science and CATS'99, Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium,
University of Auckland and CDMTCS, Auckland, New Zealand,
18-21 January 1999
DMTCS'99 and CATS'99 will be part of the Australsian Computer Science Week (ACSW'99). Original papers are solicited in all areas of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest include: (a) abstract data types and specifications, (b) algorithms and data structures, (c) automata and formal languages, (d) computability and complexity, (e) computational algebra, biology, geometry, logic and number theory, (f) concurrency, distributed systems and parallel computing, (g) constructive mathematics, (h) discrete mathematics, combinatorial computing and category theory, (I) formal semantics, specification, synthesis and verification, (j) hybrid systems and nonmonotonic logic.
Authors are invited to submit papers either in hard copy by post, or electronically by email, to the address below. Electronic submissions should be in PostScript format, printable in a standard Unix environment. LaTeX source of final versions of accepted papers will be required. Submissions should not exceed 15 pages and include an e-mail address of the corresponding author.
Joint submissions to other conferences are not permitted. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register by Nov. 6th and present their work at the conference. The proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag, Singapore in the DMTCS Series, and will be made available during the conference. Invited Speakers:
R. Downey (UVW, NZ) J. Goguen (UCSD, USA)
A. Nerode (Cornell, USA)
J. Pach (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
A. Restivo (U. Palermo, Italy)
Address For Submissions DMTCS'99+CATS'99, (Attn: Michael Dinneen), Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand, Email: mjd@cs.auckland.ac.nz
The registration fee is A $400 (which includes the dinner, excursion and proceedings), or A $100 for students (including only the proceedings).
For More Information, see the home-page of the conference http://www.tcs.auckland.ac.nz/~acsw99/, or contact the local chair Bakh Khoussainov at bmk@cs.auckland.ac.nz.
Conference Committee:
C.P. Bonnington
C.S. Calude (general chair)
E. Calude
R. Coles,
P.B. Gibbons
U. Guenther
B. Khoussainov (local chair)
ACSW'99 Contact Members:
R.W. Doran (general chair)
P. Fenwick
Programme Committee: R.J. Back, TUCS, Finland, Goncharov, Novosibirsk U., Russia; J. Harland, RMIT, Australia; R.E. Hiromoto, UTSA, USA; H. Ishihara, JAIST, Japan; M. Ito, Kyoto S.U., Japan; M. Li, U. Waterloo, Canada; X. Lin, UNSW, Australia; R. Shore, Cornell U., USA; T. Tokuyama, IBM, Japan; D. Wolfram, ANU, Australia; Proceedings Editors: C.S. Calude and M.J. Dinneen
Important Dates:
Submissions Due: 31 July 1998
Notification Date: 09 Oct. 1998
Final Copies Due: 30 Oct. 1998
Registration Date
(for authors): 06 Nov. 1998
(for others): January 1999
1998 SUMMER RESEARCH WORKSHOP AT NAPIER
The 4th summer research workshop on "Analysis and Geometry" was held in Napier, during the week 3-10 January 1998. This workshop was run under the auspices of the New Zealand Mathematics Research Institute, and supported financially by the Marsden Fund, the University of Auckland's Mathematics Department, the School of Mathematical and Information Sciences at Auckland, and the USA National Science Foundation (through Vaughan Jones).
Six principal speakers each gave three 90-minute lectures aimed at a graduate-level audience, and covering quite a spectrum of mathematics within the broad theme of analysis and geometry. There was something for everyone, the topics and speakers being as follows:
Bruce Palka, University of Texas at Austin (USA), Quasiconformal mappings.
Pekka Koskela, Jyväskylä University (Finland):, Local to global problems.
Kari Astala, Jyväskylä University (Finland):, Holomorphic motions.
Klaus Schmidt, University of Vienna (Austria):, Algebra and geometry of combinatorial tilings.
John Hutchinson, Australian National University, Random fractals.
Tadeusz Iwaniec, Syracuse University (USA), Nonlinear elasticity.
Among just over 40 conference participants attending the lectures, there were about 20 graduate students from around New Zealand and also a few from Australia, plus other participants from universities in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Sweden. Many participants came with their families. Some notes from the lectures are available to those interested (on request by email to <martin@math.auckland.ac.nz>).
Also during the workshop a meeting was held to formally establish the New Zealand Mathematics Research Institute (NZMRI), which now has a growing list of members in New Zealand and overseas, and the Directors would welcome suggestions for future workshops. That Institute was initially known as the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics, as reported in the April 1997 issue of the New Zealand Mathematical Society Newsletter, but it got renamed during the workshop. Ideas may be conveyed to any one of the 5 Directors: Vaughan Jones, David Gauld, Marston Conder, Rod Downey and Gaven Martin.
The conference venue was the Napier Conference Centre, adjacent to the Masonic Hotel where all participants had rooms and meals provided, and conveniently located: a short stroll to the beach and other facilities (including the Napier Soundshell, where entertainment in the form of singing by Vaughan Jones and some students could be heard some evenings!).
Napier proved to be an attractive venue, with good weather and lots to see and do. Most of the local attractions (including Cape Kidnappers) were enjoyed by all, with the emphatic exception of the downstairs disco at the Masonic Hotel blasting into the early hours of Saturdays and Sundays.
The conference wound up with a dinner at an open-air restaurant at Clearview Estate, one of the local wineries. Bruce Palka, in his brief after-dinner speech, made an apt quotation from Mark Twain. He was then delighted to learn that Mark Twain had given a lecture at Napier on 1895-11-28, and that Twain had then stayed at the Masonic Hotel! (That first building was destroyed by fire in 1896, and the second was destroyed by the 1931 earthquake.)
Gaven Martin
UMC'98
FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
UNCONVENTIONAL MODELS OF COMPUTATION
University of Auckland, 1998 January 5-9.
For 60 years the Turing machine model of computation has defined what it means to "compute" something; theoretical computer science is based upon it. From 1943 until 1980 the power of computers doubled about every 2 years - now it doubles every year. But despite that superexponential growth in computing power (and cheapness), many important problems will remain computationally intractable, and significant further progress in tackling such problems demands novel technologies.
The question of possible alternative computing technologies was addressed at a conference organised by the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (Auckland, New Zealand) and the Santa Fe Institute. UMC'98 brought together leading researchers in unconventional computing from a wide variety of disciplines, including computer science, mathematics, physics, psychology, engineering, biology and chemistry.
The conference featured seven invited speakers and 21 contributed talks. The Proceedings have already been published: C.S. Calude, J. Casti and M. J. Dinneen (editors), "Unconventional Models of Computation", Springer-Verlag, Singapore, 1998. They contain material grouped into three main themes: quantum computation, biologically-inspired computing and reversible models of computation. The search for models of computation that are able to break the "Turing barrier", that is, to efficiently solve problems that are difficult or impossible to solve using the Turing (or equivalent) model, is the principal goal of this work.
Artur Ekert (Oxford) explained that quantum computers offer the prospect of exponential speed-up in computation due to massive parallelism. Seth Lloyd (MIT) focussed his presentation on several unconventional quantum computing devices, including fermionic and bosonic quantum computers.
Mark Butler (Liverpool) interpreted biological systems aa examples of computational systems possessing cognitive, self-modifying and self-repairing properties. By integrating the properties of biological systems and conventional computers, we might surpass the properties of both systems. Arto Salomaa (Turku) looked at DNA computing from a language-theoretical perspective. The central theoretical component of DNA computing is Watson-Crick complementarity, which underlies the universality of models of DNA computing. The other central feature is the massive parallelism, which is responsible for rendering tractable some computational problems which sre (classically) intractable. Martyn Amos (Liverpool) talked about the practical implementation of the parallel filtering model, and John Reif (Duke) discussed a number of distinct ways of using biotechnology to do computation or processing at the molecular scale. Animesh Ray (Rochester) presented a seemingly minimum DNA computation model, which assumes the biochemical basis operations of merge, detect, synthesize, anneal and length-specific separation, but not sequence-specific separation as in many other DNA computational models.
The third main topic was reversibility. The laws of physics are themselves reversible at a microscopic level; but modern conventional computers are irreversible since they constantly discard information about their state in order to perform computation. Reversible computing devices are likely to dissipate much less energy, and hence they promise a real revolution in hardware. Tom Knight predicted that reversible computers will be faster and are soon going to be a reality. The aim of his research group is to build a reversible computer with all the accompanying software and hardware. Karl Svozil (Vienna) talked about two aspects of the physical side of the Church-Turing thesis: Zeno's argument of Achilles and the Tortoise, and the issue of one-to-one computation, that is, the bijective evolution of computations and its relation to the measurement process. Herbert Wiklicky (London) extended classical models of computing by introducing general machine models called Hilbert machines, which are more related to physical processes. In contrast to Turing and other symbol-manipulating machines, linear machine models are able to deal also with infinity and similarity. Cris Moore (Santa Fe) talked about analogue computers as dynamical systems with a finite number of continuous degrees of freedom.
The conference ended with a panel discussion chaired by Alan Gibbons (Liverpool) and Seth Lloyd, which addressed the future of these unconventional models of computing. While it is still an open question as to whether any of these unconventional models will ever go out of the laboratory, the drawing together of the disciplines of computing, mathematics, physics, engineering and biology in this pursuit has already produced new ways of thinking, a better understanding of old problems (e.g., understanding the evolution of genes and DNA sequences, or successful experiments with trapped ions or with atoms and photons in tiny cavities), and new insight.
As usually happens in research, the unpredicted discoveries and ideas which evolve during the research are likely to prove to be more interesting than the original destination.
Garry J. Tee